xplained to
the victim he frequently exclaims: "Nobody told me!" It is this fact which
condemns the pseudo-moralist. If he had seen to it that mothers began to
explain the facts of sex to their little boys and girls from childhood, if
he had (as Dr. Joseph Price urges) taught the risks of venereal disease in
the Sunday-school, if he had plainly preached on the relations of the
sexes from the pulpit, if he had seen to it that every youth at the
beginning of adolescence received some simple technical instruction from
his family doctor concerning sexual health and sexual disease--then,
though there would still remain the need of pity for those who strayed
from a path that must always be difficult to walk in, the would-be
moralist at all events would in some measure be exculpated. But he has
seldom indeed lifted a finger to do any of these things.

Even those who may be unwilling to abandon an attitude of private moral
intolerance towards the victims of venereal diseases may still do well to
remember that since the public manifestation of their intolerance is
mischievous, and at the best useless, it is necessary for them to restrain
it in the interests of society. They would not be the less free to order
their own personal conduct in the strictest accordance with their superior
moral rigidity; and that after all is for them the main thing. But for the
sake of society it is necessary for them to adopt what they may consider
the convention of a purely hygienic attitude towards these diseases. The
erring are inevitably frightened by an attitude of moral reprobation into
methods of concealment, and these produce an endless chain of social evils
which can only be dissipated by openness. As Duclaux has so earnestly
insisted, it is impossible to grapple successfully with venereal disease
unless we consent not to introduce our prejudices, or even our morals and
religion, into the question, but treat it purely and simply as a sanitary
question. And if the pseudo-moralist still has difficulty in cooeperating
towards the healing of this social sore he may be reminded that he
himself--like every one of us little though we may know it--has certainly
had a great army of syphilitic and gonorrhoeal persons among his own
ancestors during the past four centuries. We are all bound together, and
it is absurd, even when it is not inhuman, to cast contempt on our own
flesh and blood.

I have discussed rather fully the attitude of those who plead